The changing nature of customers behavior: How to better prepare

The Internet has had a huge impact on the way customers make their purchasing decisions.

People now do fairly extensive research on products and services before even contacting a company. This is shifting the “negotiating power” (if that’s the right phrase) to the consumers and away from businesses.

The key to success in this new way of shopping is content.

Regular publishing of fresh content gets the attention of the search engines and brings you visitors.

Content on your website helps prospects (and customers) learn more about what can do for them, before they have any need to make contact.

People seem to like this setup to the point that having quality content on your website is something prospects take into account when selecting the businesses they buy from.

The change in technology therefore means that small businesses must think a lot when it comes to creating content and doing their content marketing strategy day to day.

Can you predict what content your prospects want and need?

You can, and while you will have some success, you’re likely to have an interesting failure or two.

I’m not sure how many times I’ve seen some article that was published as a filler (a filler being an article whose purpose is to fill your publishing schedule), that was considered to be a rather boring ho-hum type topic become wildly popular.

A remodeling company who gets traction with an article about the various sheens of paint.

A solar power company who gets traction with an article about a solar powered boat.

A doctors office who gets traction with an article about phytic acid in whole unprocessed grains.

This website and an article about setting up the Mautic marketing automation system.

The moral of this story is…..

Just publish. Publish what you think is interesting and useful. Publish what you think is fun and quirky. Publish what you think is oddly off topic, but not too far.